Impact of bilingualism and the difficulties of having minority-specific names in another dominant society: Turkish context for minority Kurdish society

 This article is concerned with the issue of bilingualism and minoritysocieties. Obviously, due to the vastness of the topic, not all the cases worldwide canbe covered. Hence the study focused on the Turkish context. Namely, the studyexamined the Kurdish minority group in dominant Turkish society and the relatedaspects. In so doing, the paper is divided into two parts. The first part deals with whatbilingualism is. As discussed in the paper, some people benefit from the use of more168 SÜLEYMAN KASAPthan one language when they communicate with the people with different ethnic orcultural backgrounds, yet the paper argues that the use of bilingualism also facesdifficulties and assimilation in the countries where the hegemonic ideologies andcultures prohibit the use of more than one native language with fear of losing unityand native language. Secondly, the paper examines the difficulties Kurdish peopleface when they want to have Kurdish-specific names in a predominantly Turkishsociety. Hence the paper analyses the controversy over Kurdish naming in Turkeythrough a qualitative research design, in which semi-structured interviews with sevenparticipants were used. The results show that the participants had to go through manyhardships with their names written in Kurdish letters. Therefore, they have negativelybeen influenced nearly in almost all aspects of their lives because of having namesthat have got odd meanings or became meaningless at all in Turkish.Keywords: Bilingualism, minority society, Kurdish language, naming, Kurdishethnicity